


God Complex

by armyofbees



Category: Hannibal (TV), Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Dissociation, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, I'll stick by this, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, J.D. is a bad person, Minor body dysphoria, Nebulous Time Period, Paranoia, Post-Season/Series 03, Referenced murder, Reincarnation, high school is hell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-17 00:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12354108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armyofbees/pseuds/armyofbees
Summary: One year after the death of the Great Red Dragon and the fall from the cliff, a baby girl is born. Her name is Veronica Sawyer, and a pendulum swings behind her eyes just as well as it did when she was a man.





	God Complex

**Author's Note:**

> This is Bees' beta. So, one day, I was thinkin, Veronica and J.D. really parallel Hannibal and Will... and then this happened. Enjoy!

It is a bit strange, being a girl, Will admits. But he’s had seventeen years to get used to it, and the dysphoria isn’t bad enough to go through the trouble of changing. Experiencing puberty again was probably the worst of it, but at least this time he doesn’t have to deal with randomly falling in love with people. The hair these days is bad enough to dissuade him from that.

Eighteen years to the day since the Cliff, as he thinks of it. He wrote the date on the calendar he uses to track his periods (and isn’t _that_ weird), and every year he waits for the other shoe to drop. To wake up from the lucid dream, or the death hallucination, or the coma he’s been in since he took his fateful tumble.

But every year is just the same as the last, and as time passes he’s forced to accept just a little bit more that this really happened. That he pitched off a cliff with his former therapist turned friend turned nightmare and died in a splash and crack of bone, and was reborn.

As a girl. Which reminds him, he needs to put his makeup on.

He’d considered that this could be the real, and his past life as Will Graham, FBI profiler was the imagining, but as soon as he was old enough he studied the case backwards and forwards. His memories just matched up too perfectly with the grand rise and fall of Hannibal the Cannibal, and so he’s forced to accept both: that this is real, and so is the past, and somehow those two things can coexist.

Ah, lipstick perfect, hair… appropriately terrible. He’s good to go. Pulling on his jacket (a bomber, because of course), he clatters down the stairs and grabs his backpack.

“Veronica?” his mother calls from the kitchen. After seventeen years he’s finally getting used to calling her that.

“Yeah, mom! I’m heading out,” he yells back, one foot already out the door.

“You need to eat breakfast-”

But he’s already gone. She always makes sausage for breakfast, and even after all these years he’s still a vegetarian. Some phobias never go away.

The bus ride to school is mindless, but he spends it on high alert as he always does on this day. He goes to high school for the same reason he does many things: to avoid attracting attention. To avoid, even if just in his (justified, he thinks) paranoia, any vestige of his former life. Even though he’s been to college and all the angsty high school english and math classes are review, at best. Fear is a powerful force.

And then he’s there. The hallways are crowded, forcing him to hide behind his glasses as he always used to. That’s the one good thing about the massive hair - it’s very easy to lose yourself in. No need for unwanted eye contact, though he’s still being _touched_ on all sides, and it’s not okay.

But he’ll survive. He’s survived much, much worse. The things he does for his paranoia are making him miserable, but he can’t really bring himself to care.

The first part of the day passes uneventfully, in a haze of math problems he’s answered before and modern history he lived through. There’s a new kid in math, wearing a really overdramatic trench coat, but it’s hardly a blip on his radar. There’ll always be new kids, always be weirdos; he’s just glad he’s not either, anymore. One of the perks of doing high school over: he knows how to play the game.

He meets up with Betty, his… he hesitates to call her a friend, because she’s an immature teenager just like the rest of them, but her snark reminds him of Beverly, and that’s a comfort he sorely needs. They head to lunch and it’s every bad memory from the Quantico cafeteria, but that’s reassuring in how unrelated it is to certain later events. There’s nothing artful about the food, no flourishes to emphasize the skill of the chef. No attempts were made to even made to make it look good or to disguise what’s inside it. Nonetheless, as with every other day since he was old enough to choose his own food, he gets a thoroughly meatless salad.

“Still sticking to that diet fad?” Betty teases him, as she has every day since she learned the phrase back in seventh grade.

“Just keeping myself slim,” he snarks back. There’s no heat in it; both of them went through their awkward teenage weight-angst together, (which, yes, hit him too; apparently some puberty problems even world-weariness can’t overcome) and both of them came out the other side just fine. Betty laughs and clutches her greasy hamburger with a martyred expression.

“You wound me! My lunch would _never_ betray me like that.”

Will snorts as they both sit down. He’s actually looking forward to lunch, a bit; they had chickpeas in the salad bar today, and for some reason he just can’t associate chickpeas with he-who-will-not-be-named, even though the man surely cooked with them at some point. Betty eyes her hamburger with an anticipation Will envies, having lost most of his own enjoyment of food long ago. But before either of them can take a single bite, they are - he doesn’t use the word ‘rude’ anymore, not for anything - interrupted.

“Hello, Ronnie,” says a coy, slimy voice. Both Will and Betty glance up at the very unwelcome sight of Heather Chandler looming over their table. She reminds Will of a much more insecure Crawford, and that alone is enough to make him dislike her.

“Considered our offer yet? Ready to graduate from the kiddy table?” She sends a snide glance at Betty, who kind of shrinks under the gaze. Just like that, Will is reminded that she is _not_ Beverly and never will be, and is catapulted quite forcefully into the mindset of a tired old man who’s been through all of this before. It was definitely a mistake to let Heather McNamara copy his math homework, even if she is the nicest one among them. They’ve been bothering him for homework help and to join their clique ever since.

“I told you before, and my answer’s still the same: no,” he retorts, and pauses, meeting her eyes no matter how much it hurts, “I prefer friends who don’t backstab each other.” He hides with practiced ease how much painful truth is present in that statement. Heather snorts, and makes some snide threat Will instantly forgets, then turns on her heel and returns to her group.

Betty looks at him with admiring eyes, and that’s enough to shatter the last remains of the illusion he managed to build around himself today. He no longer feels hungry; he pushes his untouched salad away and puts his head down on the table. Betty makes sympathetic noises as she bites into her hamburger, but doesn’t do anything beyond that. She doesn’t tell him to buck up and get over himself. She’s not Beverly. Beverly is _dead_. Like he should be, if the universe had any logic whatsoever. Then again, after all his experiences as Will Graham, he should have known it threw logic out the window a long time ago.

Shouts arise in the corner and his head snaps up. Fights are hardly uncommon in a high school cafeteria, but they always make him jumpy. This one seems to be a confrontation between a couple of jocks whose names he can’t be bothered to learn and the new kid from his math class. Will had noticed and disregarded him with the absent-minded focus that also told him exactly which pieces of cafeteria furniture could be turned into weapons if the situation turned ugly. He hates that his brain is so broken that it does this constantly, but in moments like these he’s undeniably grateful for it.

The kid pulls a gun from his coat and Will stands, drifting towards the wobbly chair with the loose leg. Betty says something but it all fades into intelligible background noise - he pulls easily out of her grip when she grabs his wrist. The jocks stumble back, and Will watches almost in a trance as the kid slowly pulls the trigger.

There’s something mysterious and fascinating about him - he moves like he’s dancing, using the swirl of the coat as an artful device. The way he holds the gun, confident and with an air of showmanship. Oh shit, he reminds him of Hannibal.

_Oh shit, he reminds him of Hannibal!_

Okay, calm down, he tells himself, trying to convince his inner screaming that it’s just his paranoia, even as his breathing picks up and his hand clamps around the chair. It’s always his paranoia - he passed a man who looked like Eldon Stammets on the street a week ago, and nearly had a breakdown - so there’s nothing here. The kid’s just an overdramatic highschooler. No way the gun is real. No need to get worked up.

There’s two bangs. Dreamlike, Will flips the chair and twists off the loose leg, leaving him with a sharp, jagged metal pole. _Don’t think about the cliff, about the bloody dance_ The kid starts laughing. _Don’t think about the cliff_ The jocks freak out, patting themselves as if to make sure they’re still intact, but they seem to fine. Blanks. The kid was firing blanks. See? Nothing to worry about. The gun may be real, but the intent wasn’t. Will lets the pole fall to his side, to be hidden in the folds of his blue skirt. No reason to panic. He’s normal. He’s adapting. _Don’t think about_ Everything’s fine.

The kid looks up. Across the crowded cafeteria, he and Will make eye contact. Something shines in his eyes, and without Will’s conscious consent, the pendulum swings. Everything goes silent, the world slowing, slowing, stopping around him.

Victory glows in those eyes, and a celebration of power, the joy of having the strong groveling at his feet. _Don’t think_ A darkness, a pain warped and twisted into vile pleasure. Will is frozen in place for an eternal moment with familiarity and memory. _Don’t_ The pole clatters to the ground. He flees the room.

He doesn’t remember much after that. Betty finds him later, curled up in a broom closet, and brings him his backpack. When he gets home - Betty had to drive him, the buses are long gone - his mother tries to question him about skipping class. He tunes her out and drifts upstairs, caught behind the pendulum.

The one part of his life he wishes he could be rid of, and the one part that stuck with him. The pain of accidentally meeting someone’s eyes, reading them so deeply - _too_ deeply, instantly understanding their innermost, darkest desires and finding them wanting. The knowledge disgusts him on a primal level, but he _can’t stop it._

And when he looks into a pair of eyes and sees something so dark and familiar staring back…

Garrett Jacob Hobbs is laughing in his head. Abigail is watching serenely from the river. The stag trots past him in the hallway and he turns ever so slowly to watch it disappear down the stairs. He hates it and he misses it and why _now_ _,_ it’s been silent for _eighteen years-_

But he knew, didn’t he? He’s always known. It wasn’t a question of _if_ _,_ but _when._

The other shoe has dropped, and now it’s time to deal with the consequences.


End file.
